Prints and Books

Harvard University Press has partnered with De Gruyter to make available for sale worldwide virtually all in-copyright HUP books that had become unavailable since their original publication. The 2,800 titles in the “e-ditions” program can be purchased individually as PDF eBooks or as hardcover reprint (“print-on-demand”) editions via the “Available from De Gruyter” link above. They are also available to institutions in ten separate subject-area packages that reflect the entire spectrum of the Press’s catalog. More about the E-ditions Program »

Although—or perhaps because—William Ivins insists upon calling his essays “informal papers,” they will be found to possess an unusual charm and stimulation for the general reader not interested in the technicalities of either literature or art. His position in the Metropolitan Museum of Art has, as he says, been “really a bit of a lark, because it enabled him to poke about in so many interesting nooks and crannies which are ordinarily forgotten.” His book, then, “is by way of being a record of some of the happiness that has come to a man in a museum”; and if anyone carries in his mind a lingering notion that Ivins’s is a dusty job, he has but to yield to the incomparable conversation of these pages in order to learn his mistake. The volume is a farrago of information about prints, engravers, illustrated books, ornament, bookplates, and museum work. There are many illustrations in line and half-tone.